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America on the eve of the New Deal: They've always been the anti-immigrant party

Posted Monday night, November 27, 2017.

It’s been said the Right is at war with the 21st Century. Really they’re continuing a war with the last third of the 19th and the first half of the 20th.

Millions of immigrants had flooded into the country since the 1870s and taken up residence in northern and midwestern cities. Prohibition was a prelude to the 1924 National Origins Act, which threw up barriers to a continued influx of southern and Eastern European migrants who had made up the bulk of the roughly twelve million newcomers entering the United States during the previous fifty years. Many of them were Catholics and Jews---Italians, Greeks, Poles, Russians, Hungarians, and other Slavs, to mention just the most prominent nationalities---with religious affiliations and alien languages that made them indigestible masses. They defied the ideal of an American melting pot: Many in the United States doubted that the newcomers could she old way or abandon “un-American” habits, as had the northern and western Europeans who had preceded them. To be sure, fears of political radicalism and a competition for jobs in the aftermath of a postwar recession also animated the resistance to allowing more of these immigrants into the country. But the belief that these croups could never be turned into citizens who fully accepted Anglo-Saxon economic and political traditions made them antagonists of assimilated Americans.